The great irony of the neoconservative project in Georgia is the fact that neo-conservatism in America has intellectual ties with Trotskyism. Making this historic fact a part of the social discourse in the US would most certainly serve as an irritant to the neocon gospel, especially given its political alliance with the conservative religious-philosophic outlook in the American body politic.
Fortunately, the Georgian body politic does not suffer from the same limitations when discussing the roots of neo-conservatism. In Georgia, the fact that the “neo-con” ideology traces its roots to Trotskyism is frequently discussed. Although delving deeper into this issue is outside the scope of this report, it is briefly worth mentioning that the neoconservative movement would have had a better chance of establishing a lasting presence in Georgia if it had considered the fact that Georgia is a conservative, Orthodox Christian nation.
By contrast, one of the key reasons for Donald Trump’s popularity in Georgia is that he is perceived as the president who reduced the neoconservative and neoliberal establishment’s influence within Georgia. For Georgian conservatives, Trump is seen as the president who reclaimed conservatism from Washington’s neoconservative claque, by reconnecting it to the socio-cultural fabric of everyday Americans.
More broadly, to Georgian citizens, Trump is the guardian of Christianity and conservative social values that they feel have been under assault from the liberal-leftist “woke” and globalist powers. For them, it makes little political difference whether it is Latin/Roman or Protestant Christianity that stands firm against this assault. Hence, even though George W. Bush’s Republican party was profoundly Christian, and had the support of the traditional evangelical base, the Georgian conservative establishment perceived it as having been hijacked by the “neoconservative international” with its strict adherence to militarist and universalist dogma of the Wolfowitz Doctrine.
Noam Chomsky captured this dogmatic marriage of Christian faith with the US foreign policy when he provided a detailed account of a conversation between the then French President Jacques Chirac and Bush, during which Bush discussed an obscure passage from the Bible of “Gog and Magog” to imply that god would soon be at war with his enemies in Iraq. The implication of Chomsky’s story was to describe Bush’s desire to “cleanse” Iraq of evil, and to demonstrate the profound dangers of such thinking.
The point here is not that there was a scarcity of Christianity in the Bush White House, or that Georgian society would not have gobbled it all up if Bush had only shrewdly applied it to his relations with Saakashvili, but that the Bush foreign policy team applied a neoconservative internationalism that combined strong social engineering, universalism and militarism that evoked visceral feelings among Georgians that this was neither a democratic nor a Christian conservatism. It seemed instead a concerted effort to turn Georgia into a regional base for Trotskyist style permanent révolution against Russia. If Trump manages to insulate his administration from neoconservative universalism and militarism, even partially, then Georgia’s relationship with the US will stand a better chance of improving.
However, a change that will most certainly guarantee better relations between Tbilisi and Washington would be President Trump’s embrace of a realist foreign policy to navigate our new multipolar world. The shift from unipolarity to multipolarity has affected the regional geopolitics of the South Caucasus. Despite Trump’s campaign promise and his current efforts as president to end the Russo-Ukrainian war, as well as his reluctance to pursue traditional American adventurism in the Middle East, the jury is still out on whether he will come under the sway of traditional neoconservative ideologues, keen on embroiling the US in yet another tragic wars in the Middle East. Judging by most recent bombing campaigns in Yemen, and an increasing pressure to strike Iran as a way to prevent that country from building a nuclear weapon, Trump faces a historic challenge to resist the bombing of yet another sovereign nation in the Middle East, use strategic prudency, manage Iran’s nuclear program, engage with it economically and eventually resist the domestic cabal of ideologues in Washington. However, even in the midst of such a gloomy scenario, it is manifestly clear that Trump (personally) recognizes that the multipolar world order has returned. On a personal level, his instinct seems to be that the repeat or continuation of the foreign policy of his predecessors will stain his political legacy, and will further strengthen the geopolitical resistance against the US in the other two major capitals of the world: Moscow and Beijing. Accordingly, Trump sees China as a possible bridge between the US and Russia in negotiations over Ukraine. More critically, Trump’s view on the strategic competition with China is also apparent in his desire to “channel Nixon” and balance Russia against China. Considering that the Trump administration is engaged in a trade war with Beijing; and the complete erosion of trust of Moscow towards Washington that the neocon-neoliberal elites singlehandedly worked hard to create, the possibility of launching a fruitful dialogue with Moscow to pull off such strategic brilliance are slim to none. Nevertheless, what this shows is that Trump might be willing to exercise pragmatism, even in the face of such challenges. At the very least he is attempting to marginalize the sinister neocon influence on American statecraft.
That the conditions for sustaining the liberal international order led by the US are no longer conducive to maintaining the American primacy of the post-Cold War era will soon be apparent in the new geopolitical order being shaped by the US and Russia in ending the war in Ukraine. In this new arrangement, Ukraine will be the main loser, as it faces a division of its territory by a hostile power. Its national economic wealth is up for grabs as leverage for negotiations between Russia and America. In other words, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 ended the sovereignty of that country as the world has known it since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Simply put, after a decades-long struggle to become a member of the western political and economic architecture, Ukraine has nothing to show for it except its destruction. It now has no prospects of becoming a member of NATO.
Europe too has been relegated to the margins as a result of the above shift in the international system. Although the US will continue to guarantee Europe’s security, the “old continent” is no longer the geopolitical centerpiece that it once was during the Cold War, mainly because the strategic threat to the continent has disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
America’s continuous search for strategic relevance for NATO resulted in disasters for Georgia with the five day war in 2008, and, on a much larger scale, for Ukraine in 2022. Lurking behind these disasters has always been the deep-seated interest of the collective West to weaken Russia on its own turf, in the Eurasian Heartland. However, the West once again failed to achieve their goal. With an ideologically-driven foreign policy, the collective West manufactured baseless accusations that Russia would invade Europe, after it had finished off Ukraine. Ironically, this Western chimera to double down on Russia resulted in the strengthening of Russia on the Eurasian continent. According to NATO SACEUR Christopher Cavoli, the Russian army is now larger than it was on February 24, 2022. In other words, using Ukraine to weaken Russia might have accelerated the return of multipolarity, thus shortening the longevity of America’s primacy in the unipolar world.
The thrust of this shift in the international system is also felt in the sub-region of the Eurasian heartland- the South Caucasus. With the strengthening of the Russian Federation in Eurasia, the South Caucasian region will experience less, not more insecurity. According to Saul Cohen, a geopolitical theorist, if the West succeeds in penetrating the “convergence zone” of Eurasia, which entails the South Caucasus, it will result in the emergence of “shatter zones.” The question then becomes, will the West’s failure to penetrate the convergence zone mitigate the further deterioration of conditions in the current shattered zone of the South Caucasus? The effects on the South Caucasus of the current shift in the international system indicate that the less successful the West is in indulging in its adventurism in the region, the better the chances are for Georgia to establish pragmatic relations with Moscow, thus mitigating the negative effects of its location in this shatter zone.
The history of the past thirty years has shown that Georgia’s foreign policy of idealism, heavily dependent on the United States, has been delusional. As with Ukraine, the US does not have vital national security interests in the region, and therefore its meddling hardly demonstrates a true geo-strategic commitment, the likes of which Washington made towards Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Middle East, during and after the Cold War. Moreover, throughout the long sweep of history, Russia has committed to maintaining its influence in the South Caucasus, precisely because it sees it as a “soft underbelly” from which the West has tried to weaken and divide it. In other words, the geopolitical space of the South Caucasus represents a vital national security interest for Russia. Hence, it will go to great lengths to prevent the emergence of a Western-led security architecture in the region. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was a clear manifestation of this strategy in action. Therefore, Georgia, as a small state in the international system, must continue to craft its foreign policy with a strict adherence to the principles of geopolitics, and the national security interests of the regional powers.
In a significant concept paper, the rector of the Sokhumi State University (Tbilisi, Georgia), Professor Zurab Khonelidze, presented the idea that the South Caucasus is a single geopolitical space. In the book titled, ‘Georgian Paradigm of Peace,’ Khonelidze dedicates a chapter to the concept called “The South Caucasus, Geopolitical Space- New Format for Regional Cooperation.” It offers piercing analyses of the function and role of the South Caucasus in the international system.
Khonelidze challenges the mistaken approach of the collective West, and particularly of the US, which singles out Georgia as an exclusive candidate for membership in the Western economic, political and security architecture. The author sees this as a policy that narrows and limits the functionality/operability of the entire geopolitical space for regional and outside powers. The experience of the last thirty years has shown that Western attempts to carve out specific spheres of influence in the region by singling out Georgia, have been countered by Russia with military means—all at the expense of Georgia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Instead, the proposed alternative is to widen the regional interests of the great powers without pinning their respective interests against each other at the expense of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. The idea being that if neither of the three republics can be singled out from its geopolitical core, which is the South Caucasus, then the geopolitical space the region offers can be widened for outside powers to implement their respective geopolitical and geo-economic interests, without subjecting the region or any individual state in the South Caucasus to proxy wars against Russia. Although the process that could consolidate this vision is complex, there is evidence to suggest that, in the long run, the region is manifesting political signs that are conducive to its geopolitics and the respective interests of its three members.
Despite its longing for a future in the West, Georgia continues to find itself at the mercy of great power politics. Nevertheless, recent months and years have shown that there is a way for Georgia to survive as a small state. The Georgian Dream government has managed to correctly identify fundamental changes taking places in the international system, and has adjusted Georgia’s foreign policy to those dynamics—and against enormous challenges put up by the US and EU. This has allowed GD to avoid repeating the tragedy of the war with Russia in 2008, thereby saving Georgia’s statehood. While the current diplomatic conflict with Washington and Brussels is certainly unprecedented and unnecessary, Georgia’s Western partners must understand that Georgia will stay committed to its chosen Western path, but not at the expense of its national security. So far, Georgia has been able to establish and keep the correct balance between its northern neighbor and its western partners (not without challenges), and it must continue to do so.
More broadly, the non-Western world seems to be moving on from the “dogmatic slumber” the West had put it under for the last thirty years. Washington too has expressed its desire to get back to realism and end its obsession with going to faraway lands “in search of monsters to destroy.” However, even though Donald Trump’s White House seems to be an island of pragmatism in a sea of brittle dogmatism, the current president will continue to face challenges in creating a more stable world order.
Neoconservative and neoliberal ideologues are running out of options, but still hold to their dreams of hegemony. Energized by a visceral hatred of Russia, they continue to fume as they watch President Trump slowly dismantle Ukraine in his negotiations with Vladimir Putin.
As the night falls on the neoconservative era, it has all but disappeared as the “only game in town” in Tbilisi (and other capitals of Europe). Imposition of sanctions on the current GD government is more revealing of their failed strategic thinking, much like on Ukraine, than the possibility of destroying GD or causing yet another color revolution. Those days are simply gone.
The question now facing them is how they will sustain the fervor of their permanent revolution in Georgia against Russia, should Tbilisi find a way to restore its sovereignty with Moscow. For the neoconservative and neoliberal factions in Washington, trapped in their absolutism, finding answers to this question will remain a formidable challenge.
Op-Ed by Lasha Kasradze*
*Giorgi (Lasha) Kasradze is an international relations analyst with a focus on the states of the former Soviet Union. His articles have appeared in the National Interest, The New Eastern Europe and Neutrality Studies. He holds degrees in international relations from Rollins College and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
